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After a few minutes, his town car rolled up, and they disappeared inside, along with Dash, who didn’t seem to have a part in their conversation whatsoever.
I walked home, taking my heels off halfway after they started pinching the sides of my toes. Strolling barefoot for two miles along dirty New York sidewalks is not my finest moment, but I was too busy basking in something that felt akin to freedom to care.
The secret’s out.
Nicola knows.
And while I’m still technically bound to the NDA, she isn’t.
I can only hope she tells Dorian all the things I never could—and that he realizes my hands may have been tied and my lips might have been sealed, but my heart was always his.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
DORIAN
Present Day
“Damn, that was fast.” A pink-haired woman in a faded Led Zeppelin T-shirt and denim overalls answers the door to apartment 3C, a five-dollar bill in her hand. “I literally ordered, like, not even five minutes ago.”
“I’m sorry . . . is Briar here?” I ask. “I was told this was her address.”
I’m lying—I technically googled it. And then I paid some shady website fifty bucks to unblur her information. But I don’t want to sound like a stalker.
“Uh, who are you?” She braces herself against the door, keeping one foot on the other side like a human doorstop.
“Dorian. Is she home?”
Her pointed expression softens. “Holy shit. You’re Dorian?”
I frown, unsure if this is a good “holy shit” or a bad one.
“Yes.” I steal a quick glimpse into the apartment, only from here, all I can see is a mirror hanging on a wall behind her. “Is she here? I need to talk to her. It’s important.”
I could have called, I suppose, but texting or calling over something like this feels wrong. Plus I want to see her face. I want to hear the truth from her lips, with her voice, her eyes on mine.
“I’m sorry.” Her lips tuck to one side. “She just left, actually.”
Damn it. “Where’d she go?”
“For a walk?” The woman lifts a shoulder. “She moped around the apartment for, like, a solid hour when she got home, and then she changed her clothes and said she needed fresh air.”
This city is nothing but sidewalks.
She could be anywhere.
I could wander these streets for days and not come close to finding her.
“Thank you,” I say.
I head downstairs, phone clenched tightly, ready to call her despite the fact that it isn’t how I wanted this to happen.
Once outside, I take a seat on the steps to her building, stopping to gather my thoughts. I’m queuing up her number when something catches my eye.
No, not something.
Someone.
Half a block away is a vision in gray sweats and dad sneakers, her hair stuffed under a Red Sox cap and her eyes hidden behind mirrored aviators.
My heart knocks inside my chest with every step that brings us closer.
“Oh my god,” she says when she realizes I’m outside her apartment building. “What are you doing here?”
I rise to meet her.
“Is it true?” First things first.
“You’re going to have to be more specific than that . . .”
“Nicola overheard your conversation at the law firm. She said you signed some contract to pretend to be engaged to my brother. That he was paying you. That none of it was real.” While the entire thing feels like something only a psychopath could dream up, it all reeks of Burke and his prideful desperation. The man has always had a sense of entitlement a mile wide and infinitely deep. Couple that with his inability to feel guilty about anything, ever, and it’s the perfect recipe for this pathetic little scheme.
Not to mention, what woman in her right mind would turn down the opportunity to make a million dollars by hanging out on some private island for eight weeks . . .
I could never fault her for that.
Briar slides her sunglasses down, revealing eyes that turn glassier by the second. “I wanted to tell you . . . so many times . . . I couldn’t. Legally. I-I tried to think of so many ways to get around it, hoping somehow you could read between the lines . . . I didn’t know what to do. I would have walked away from the money, from the contract, but Burke said—”
I close the distance between us, cupping her face in my hands and grazing my thumb against her quivering lower lip.
A single tear slides down her cheek.
I swipe it away.
And in the middle of a crowded midtown sidewalk, I kiss my girl.
“I’ve loved you from the moment I saw you,” I tell her. “And I never stopped. Even when I wanted to. Even when it killed me.”
“I love you too.”
In the moments that follow, the busy world around us disappears, becoming nothing but background noise until an old man with a Brooklyn accent yells for us to get a room.
